It is difficult to measure the intellectual value of the women of the Renaissance, as their influence went out in a thousand rills, seen and unseen, to fertilize after-ages, and not least our own. There were many good writers, but no great ones, unless we except Vittoria Colonna, whose poems, though unequal, were of a high and intrinsic literary as well as moral quality. As an _in memoriam_ her sonnets to her husband are not likely to die, and as the first collection of sacred poems her later work has a distinct and honorable place on the world’s records. Why there were no artists of note is a problem not easy to solve, as the field is one in which women seem especially fitted to excel. Elisabetta Sirani might have won a high place on the roll of fame, as great critics were struck with her vigor, her grasp of large subjects, her facile style, and her careful finish; but she lived in the decline of art, and died at twenty-six. Women were more famous as scholars, and many of them stood on a level with distinguished men. Educated with them in the best schools, their tastes were formed on the best models. A lady who converses or lectures before learned dons in Latin, and writes the purest Greek, is not a shallow pretender, though she may be neither original nor profound. Nor do they seem to have been pedants, though much of the phraseology of both men and women strikes us now as stilted and inflated; it was the style of the day. No doubt there was more or less dilettantism, which was a weakness of the time that ended in the destruction of literary values; it is quite possible, too, that many liked what it was the fashion to like, as they have done in all ages, without any clear tastes or convictions of their own, though this foible is by no means confined to women. That period, like our own, had its army of pale imitators who follow in the wake of every movement that is likely to reflect on them a small degree of honor, and in the end sink its finest standards in hopeless mediocrity. But the influence of a multitude of highly educated and intelligent women is too subtle and far-reaching to put into definite terms. To trace it in its large results, even if this were possible, would take us far beyond our present limits. It is felt at every moment, in the home, in society, in amusements, in the church. It directs the currents of men’s lives from the starting-point, it infolds them like light, it is a stimulant and an inspiration. But no one knows precisely where it begins or ends. This is why it has been so ignored, why men, except in individual cases, have so persistently depreciated the qualities that opened for them the way to the finest issues.